L’Chaim!
A Celebration of America
Shabbat Worship Service
Temple Emanu-El invites you to a musical celebration honoring the Jews who helped shape this nation as we toast 250 years of American independence.
Join Broadway performers Jenny Lee Stern (Rocky: The Musical, Forbidden Broadway) and Cooper Grodin (The Phantom of the Opera national tour, Masquerade), for a mini-concert featuring beloved selections from the Jewish American songbook.
Highlights include Irving Berlin’s God Bless America, Neil Diamond’s America, Frank Sinatra’s The House I Live In, and Jay and the Americans’ Only in America, produced, directed and hosted by Scott Siegel, creator of Town Hall’s Broadway by the Year series.
With special readings and prayer, we will celebrate America’s Semiquincentennial with Jewish flair!
A festive Red, White & Blue Oneg on the 9th floor roof will follow.
America at 250: Jewish Communities at the Birth of the Nation
Stories of the Revolutionary War tend to focus on Betsy Ross sewing the Stars and Stripes, Paul Revere’s midnight ride to warn the Minutemen and George Washington and his ragtag army barely surviving the winter at Valley Forge.
But Haym Salomon is sometimes absent, although after being sentenced to execution for attempting to blow up a British warehouse on Washington’s orders, escaped and helped finance the decisive Battle of Yorktown, as is Francis Salvador, the first Jew killed in the Revolutionary War. Missing too is Mordecai Sheftall, the highest-ranking Jewish officer in the Continental Army.
While Jews made up less than 0.04 percent of the American population in 1776, they left an indelible mark on the nation’s founding.
As we celebrate the Semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence, The Temple Emanu‑El Streicker Cultural Center is proud to highlight and honor the often-overlooked contributions of our Jewish forebears in a program led by Dr. Jonathan Sarna (Brandeis University), Dr. Laura Arnold Leibman (Princeton University), Joseph Weisberg (PhD candidate, Brandeis University), Dr. Shari Rabin (Oberlin College) and Dr. Toni Pitock (Drexel University), some of the foremost experts in early American Jewish history.